The latest Android-based smart TV platform – cunningly called Android TV – is by my reckoning Google’s third stab at becoming a force to be reckoned with in the smart TV world. Actually its fourth if you also include the early and little-seen Android 4.2 Jelly Bean effort introduced on a few high-end Philips TVs in a handful of European territories last year.

The Linux desktop has changed considerably over the years, and today's desktop developers have a considerably different mindset than in years gone by. Datamation takes a look at eight trends happening in today's Linux desktop.

Clonezilla 2.4.2-21 has been released and is available for download. Clonezilla is a Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and it offers a Live (bootable) CD that features all the necessary utilities for cloning the content of hard drives.

While Debian 9.0 "Stretch" most likely will not be officially released until 2017 given that Debian 8 "Jessie" was just released a few months ago, the Debian Installer team has already put out their first alpha version for Stretch.

Andy Greenberg was speeding along a busy interstate in St. Louis recently when he suddenly lost control of his vehicle. The accelerator abruptly stopped working. The car crawled to a stop. As 18-wheelers whizzed by his stalled vehicle, Greenberg began to panic.

However, the part that I wanted to focus on is related to a discussion we were just having a few weeks ago, in which General Motors (which was not the target of this particular hack) claimed that any sort of tinkering with their software, such as to discover these kinds of security holes, should be considered copyright infringement, thanks to Section 1201 of the DMCA. Section 1201, also known as the anti-circumvention provision, says circumventing "technological protection measures" (TPMs) -- even for reasons that have nothing to do with copyright -- should be deemed copyright infringement and subject to all the statutory damages (up to $150k per violation!) that copyright allows. Some have been pushing for an exemption for things like security researchers tinkering with new connected car systems to make sure they're safe. And GM and other automakers have said "no way." GM's argument is, more or less, that the company would prefer to put its head in the sand, and not have security researchers help it discover security flaws in its systems -- leaving only malicious attackers to find those.

After a long wait Mac and Linux users will finally be able to play the popular open-world building RPG, Terraria. According to several tweets from Re-Logic's official Terraria Twitter account, an open public beta for the Linux and Mac version of the game will launch "sometime tomorrow." More details will be released prior to the beta launch, according to Re-Logic's tweets.

So after what seems like years (well, at least three years) of rumour, speculation, sneak peaks, demos, SDKs and missed deadlines, punters can now pre-order Valve’s Steam Machine video PC-based games hardware, ahead of a full launch in November this year.

Details, as ever, are still a little flakey, particularly with regards to the European launch - but it’s an interesting product that could make a significant and disruptive impact on the established PC and console games hardware and software markets in 2016.

We reported last week that Kubuntu's Jonathan Riddell expressed his feelings regarding Canonical's IP (Intellectual Property) policy for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, which was updated on the same day his blog post was written, July 15, 2015.

One reason Linux -- and by extension Android -- have grown so quickly in embedded is that from very early on Linux was imbued with strong wireless support. Although ARM and others are working hard to improve wireless support on microcontrollers with efforts such as ARM's Mbed OS, for the most part if your gizmo needs WiFi, you need to set aside MCUs and RTOSes and move to Linux or Android running on a faster processor.

Today, the Tizen Store has launched its paid service in Nepal, meaning developers can now sell paid applications to 4 countries – India , Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and now Nepal. Last week we spotted the firmware file for the Samsung Z1 Nepal and now with todays announcement the launch should be within a matter of weeks.

Android M isn’t going to be a massive game-changer like Android 5.0 Lollipop was. However, it will have some small-but-important tweaks and improvements that will noticeably improve the consumer experience. Green Bot recently put together a slideshow of the small changes Google has made with Android M and we’ve picked out five of them that we think Android diehards will love. Check them out below and be sure to check out Green Bot’s full slideshow by clicking here.

People in the Big Data and Hadoop communities are becoming increasingly interested in Apache Spark, an open source data analytics cluster computing framework originally developed in the AMPLab at UC Berkeley, and IBM recently announced a major commitment to Spark, billing it as "potentially the most important new open source project in a decade that is being defined by data."

With data stores continuing to grow exponentially, data scientists increasingly need the ability to perform robust analysis of that data at massive scale. Cloudera, which has always specialized in analytics powered by Apache Hadoop, has announced a number of new initiatives to enable data scientists to take advantage of big data and Hadoop for analytics with more complex workflows. Here are details.

Although Oracle has its own Linux operating system, it continues to push forward on its Solaris Unix OS. Oracle recently rolled out a beta preview release of the next-generation Solaris 11.3, which builds on improvements and innovations that Oracle has been developing since the Solaris 11 release in November 2011. The Solaris 11.1 debuted in October 2012 and provided incremental updates to the Unix platform. The Solaris 11.2, which debuted in July 2014, included an integrated OpenStack Havana cloud distribution. In Solaris 11.3, Oracle is updating the OpenStack distribution to the Juno cloud milestone. While the cloud is a key focus in all Solaris 11.x releases, so too is file system performance with Oracle's ZFS, or Zettabyte File System. In Solaris 11.3, ZFS is enhanced with LZ4 compression support to further boost storage capabilities. While Solaris can run on both x86 and on Oracle's Sparc silicon, only Sparc users will benefit from Solaris 11.3's new application data integrity (ADI) feature. ADI works with the SPARC M7 processor and can help detect common memory errors. Take a look at key features in Oracle's Solaris 11.3.

ServiceStack is a good alternative for alternative to popular Microsoft technologies used for building services like WCF and WebAPI because of its simplicity, high performance, and true platform independence and less configuration. I have been exploring ServiceStack these days and would like to present a discussion on it in this article.

The SGI study 2015 is published by the Bertelsmann Foundation, a German think tank promoting good governance and sustainable development. It is the fourth edition of the study, the first Sustainable Governance Indicators were published in 2009.

Promoting the use of collaborative platforms to encourage citizen participation, opening data on the Web and encouraging the re-use of open data in mobile applications are among the 10 ideas for an open City Council, listed in a report from the Regional Observatory of the Information Society of Castile and Leon (ORSI).

For years, meteorology students learned their craft at the tip of a colored pencil, laboriously contouring observed data by hand. While many forecasters still practice this art, computers have changed operations, research, and education. Open source software and open data are poised to bring more changes to the field.

GPS navigation is an important function for any smartphone, but there wasn't anything for Ubuntu Touch until recently. As it happens, an application that's called just that, GPS Navigation, has been released a few weeks back and now a new major update has been made available.

I'd like to request that the Community Council moves the Canonical IP
policy off the Ubuntu website.
http://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/intellectual-property-policy

It was revealed last week that is policy breached the GPL and still
leaves open numerous gaps in the ability of people to freely share,
copy and modify Ubuntu. It is hurting the reputation of Ubuntu as a
welcoming and functional free software project that respects the
licence of the upstreams we depend on.

Other problems include delaying releases with critical bug fixes, making breaking changes in minor releases, and not providing an upgrade path between versions. Not mentioning known limitations of a software project is also a problem.

Maintainers also can ruin the integrity of code by introducing legal ambiguity and not applying a proper open source license, Keepers said. Violating patents, copyrights, or trademarks also are issues.

On July 22, Canonical's Jonas G. Drange informed us all that the Ubuntu Touch developers managed to finish the Wi-Fi Hotspot (also known as Internet Tethering) functionality for the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system.

The Orca open-source screen reader and magnifier software used in numerous GNU/Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu and other GNOME-based ones, has reached version 3.17.4 as part of the upcoming GNOME 3.17.4 desktop environment.

We chose to hone in on one particular plugin to highlight how even the very specific domain of marine navigation software is following the same evolutionary pattern as other open source domains: they are extending beyond the simple sharing of code and coding practices to include information repositories. The amount of collective knowledge shared by millions of boaters around the world could not be possibly generated, let alone owned, by a single organization. It needs to be a shared asset.

The GNOME developers are still finishing the latest bits for the upcoming GNOME 3.17.4 desktop environment, a snapshot towards GNOME 3.18, and they have just released the GNOME Boxes 3.17.4 open-source virtualization software based on the QEMU with KVM technology.

On July 22, Arne Exton, the developer of several GNU/Linux and Android-x86 distributions, announced that he updated his Android-x86 KitKat 4.4.4 distro to build 7, a release that brings Linux kernel 4.0.8, Mesa 10.5.9, and other goodies.

We've seen a remarkable growth in community all over the world—people are getting together to make things, do things, hack, etc. This simple idea of people getting together to make communities makes Jono Bacon excited (me too). He hosted a half-day workshop at OSCON about community management, where he shared with us his packaged thoughts on building strong communities.